Head cases

by Scott Nicholson

  She turned on her back, resigned to her fate. She would die quietly, but she wanted to see its face. Not the face it showed to human eyes, the one of glass panes and cornerstones and sheet metal. She wanted to see its true face.

  She saw a silhouette, a blacker shape against the night. A splinter of silver catching a stray strand of distant streetlight, flashing at her like a false grin. A featureless machine pressing close, its breath like stale gin and cigarette butts and warm copper.

  Its voice fell from out of the thick air, not with the jarring clang of a bulldozer or the sharp rumble of tractor trailer rig, but as a harsh whisper.

  "Gimme your money, bitch."

  So the city had sent this puny agent after her? With all its great and awesome might, its monumental obelisks, its omnipotent industry, its cast-iron claws, its impregnable asphalt hide, its pressurized fangs, it sends this?

  The city had a sense of humor. How wonderful!

  She thought of that old children's story, the "Three Billy Goats Gruff," how the smaller ones had offered up the larger ones to slake the evil troll's appetite. She laughed, filling the cramped alley with her cackles. "A skinny thing like me would hardly be a mouthful for you," she said, the words squeezing out between giggles.

  She felt the city's knife press against her chest, heard a quick snip, and felt her handbag being lifted from her shoulder. The straps hung like dark spaghetti, and the city tucked the purse against its belly. The city, small and dark and- human.

  Now she saw it. The human machine had a face the color of bleached rags, dingy mop strings dangling down over the hot sparks of eyes. Thin wires sprouted above the coin-slot mouth. Why, he was young. The city eats its young.

  "You freakin' city folks is all nuts," the city said, then ran into the street, back under the safe sane lights.

  Its words hung over Elise's head, but they'd come from another world. A world of platinum and fiberglass, locomotives and razor blades. The real world. Not her world.

  As the real city awoke and busied itself with its commerce and caffeine, it might have seen Elise sprawled among the rubble of a rundown neighborhood, flanked by empty wine bottles and used condoms and milk cartons graced with the photographs of anonymous children. It might have smelled her civet perfume, faint but there, which she had dabbed on her neck in an attempt to smell like everyone else. It might have heard the wind fluttering the collar of her Christian Dior blouse, bought so that she could blend in with the crowd. It might have felt the too-light weight of her frail body, wasted by a steady diet of fear. It might have tasted the human salt where tears of relief had dried on her cheeks.

  It might have divined her dreams, intruded on her sleep to find goats at the wheels of steamrollers, corrugated snakes slithering as endlessly as escalators among gelatin hills, caravans of television antennas dancing across flat desert sands, and a flotilla of cellular phones on a windswept ocean of antifreeze, an owl and a pussycat in each.

  If the city sensed these things, it remained silent.

  The city kept its secrets.

  LETTERS AND LIES

  By Scott Nicholson

  "Neither rain nor gloom nor dead of night…that doesn't sound right. Now how does that go?" Charlie Blevins shook his head. "Something something appointed rounds."

  Charlie steered his postal jeep to the curb on Poplar Hills, where box houses with vinyl siding and slatted shutters horseshoed around a cul-de-sac. All the poplars had been cut down because the trees got too tall and homeowners' insurance had gone up. The leaves of the spindly maples that had been planted in their stead were just beginning to turn orange-red, and the grass smelled sweetly of autumn. This was Charlie's favorite time of year.

  He lifted the bundle of papers, letters, and catalogs off the seat beside him and swung his tan, knobby legs onto the pavement. The two little dogs behind the fence at 106 were yapping, just as if he hadn't driven by every day, excepting legal holidays and Sundays, for the last five years. Punters, Charlie called them, the kind that would lift satisfyingly off the foot and sail about ten yards.

  Charlie walked along the fence to the mail slot hanging by the garage door. The punters followed him every step of the way, tumbling over each other in their frenzy. Charlie pulled a rubber band off the pile of mail, glanced around to make sure the snoopy old bat at 108 wasn't watching, and shot the rubber band through the chain links, hitting the closest dog in the nose. Its face registered surprise, and a good two seconds passed as its brain analyzed the new information. It decided pain was the message the brain was receiving, and the brain sent an order to the dog's mouth commanding it to yelp.

  "The U.S. Postal Service. We deliver," Charlie said, blissfully unaware that he had lifted the line from a rival package company. He walked to 107, whistling cheerfully. 107 had a heft of mail, including a pair of periodicals in plain brown wrappers. Charlie recognized the return address. He delivered a lot of these "pictorials" to this end of town, where the citizens were just solid enough to worry about appearances. They couldn't just buy their smut off the convenience store rack, right in front of God, the PTA, or whoever else might happen to stop in for a Big Gulp and a pack of smokes.

  Charlie dropped off the stack and continued to 108. The curtains didn't part, so Miss Mauretta Whiting, You May Already Be A Winner, was definitely not at home. Today she had a pair of sweepstakes packages from the same clearing house, one addressed to "Maura White," the other to "Ma Whiting." If she had been home, she would be standing by the mailbox waiting for him.

  "Time-dated material," she would say. She personally blamed him for all the shortcomings of the postal service. She didn't even have to be standing there for Charlie to hear her thin, scratchy voice.

  "Why, for thirty-three cents, I'd expect a letter to get here the day before it was mailed. You keep chargin' more and more and gettin' slower and slower. Sometimes they don't get through at all. Back in my day…"

  Yeah, they used to walk through six feet of snow with one hand tied behind their backs and a pack of starving wolves latched onto their ankles. Well, this isn't your day anymore, lady, thought Charlie.

  He opened her mailbox and crammed it full with her beloved sweepstakes material. Maybe she was just perpetually disappointed that his jeep, and not Ed McMahon's prize wagon, that drove up.

  She vanished from his mind as he made his way to 109. The flag was up at the box, so Charlie reached in and pulled out a couple of letters in #10 envelopes. As his fingers brushed the letters, a mild tingle crawled up his arm. He hoped his blood sugar wasn't getting low again. He walked back to the jeep and tossed the letters in the "out" basket without looking at them.

  Charlie finished his rounds and drove back to the office. He walked up the loading bay ramp with the basket of outgoing mail, passing Susan, the counter clerk, who was sucking on a Virginia Slim. Her eyelashes drooped from the weight of mascara, like tree branches that were laden with wet leaves. Charlie's private nickname for her was "Next Window," because she had the far more pressing responsibility of pleasing the stockholders of her favorite tobacco company than satisfying the postal customers of Silver Falls, Virginia.

  She looked ready to complain, so Charlie obliged. "Hey, Susan, how's it going?"

  "My feet are killing me," she said. "I'm thinking about putting in for disability."

  "Well, darling, you go right ahead and then come back in a few months and see how this place falls apart without you. We'd have St. Louis in with San Francisco and next-day air freight would be stacked in the broom closet."

  She fluttered her eyelashes. "And you'd think a girl would get a raise once in a while. At least a 'thank you' would be nice."

  "There's always the satisfaction of a job well done." Not that you would know, Charlie silently added. He walked over to the sorter and dumped his basket. Most of the mail would zip down to the center in Danville, where it would leave tonight for parts all over the country and world. Some of it would stay in the office and go out tomorrow on the local rou
tes. A piece or two would fall in a crack and gather lint for a while.

  Bob Fender stood by a package bin, looking at a letter as if it were a spot of blood. His blue suspenders, already taut, stretched to the snapping point as he bent over and picked it up. He saw Charlie and said, "Hey, look here at this."

  Charlie squinted at the letter, cursing the weak fluorescent lights. The postmark was dated fifteen years ago. This branch office had only been open for four years. Before that, they had worked out of a little stone building that had been crumbling since the turn of the century. Somehow, the letter had made the move and remained hidden, like a stowaway that had forgotten to disembark. Bob was willing and able to spend a half-hour of government-subsidized time recounting its possible history.

  "That damned thing is loster than a preacher at a strip joint," said Bob. A good-natured guffaw rippled the folds of his beer gut.

  "If it was a love letter, you can bet the flame has long since flickered out," said Charlie. "If it's a check, the account's probably closed. If it was news from home, there's sure nothing new about it now."

  "Makes you wonder, though. Looks like a woman's handwriting, or maybe one of them fancy college boy’s. Funny, ain't one word changed in this thing in fifteen years while the rest of the world's just gone on getting crazier. Just like every time there's a mail bomb, everybody yells, 'It was the Aye-rabs,' but then they come to find out it was a good corn-fed country boy instead of a raghead. Just gone on getting crazier." Bob shook his head. "Them was simpler times back then."

  "Sure was." Charlie was anxious to steer Bob off-track before he really got rolling on the list of society's ills. "So, you going to give this to Red?"

  "Well, curiosity killed the cat and never did no good for the mouse, neither. If we deliver this, there'd be a story in the local paper for sure. Some snot-nosed kid fresh out of newspaper school would have a field day comparing us to snails and all that."

  "Yeah, and then laugh up their sleeve like they were the first ones to ever think of it."

  "This baby's going on a one-way trip to the dead letter office." Bob tossed it in the trash can. "What they don't know won't hurt them."

  After Bob left, Charlie picked the letter out of the can and looked at the return address. He went into the bathroom and locked the door, then tore open the envelope and slid the letter out. It was musty, like a canvas tent that had been stored in the basement too long. Charlie unfolded the two yellowed pages and read the big cursive scrawl:

  Dear Rita:

  I know you really owe me nothing since it was a mutual decision to break up. I heard you got married, and I hope you're happy because you deserve it. Here in Kansas, even the sky is flat. I can hardly go day-to-day, sometimes there's no reason to get out of bed. Remember when you used to laugh and say I was crazy? Well, I guess you were more right than you know.

  There's a hole where hope used to be. See that trick of words, how one letter can change everything. The world I see is now the word I see. Sometimes when the night is black, I look for stars and all I see are scars. My heart is bound with barbwire, and despair is a prison of my own design and execution. Funny, I wanted to be a writer, now I'm a waiter. I guess it's only people and words, and words tell lies.

  I used to play the existentialist, all that heavy stuff about the individual and the freedom of choice. Well, Camus and Nietzsche are dead, so what does it mean? Maybe that's the point. Enough philosophy, I know that stuff always bored you silly. I'd love to hear from you, so drop a note (not a not) to say you're alive and that somewhere there are butterflies and sunshine. I'm not asking you to understand, I just want to hear from you while I figure out if life is worth living. One letter makes all the difference.

  Best wishes,

  Jason

  Charlie had a feeling that Jason was reunited with his old friends Cay-mus and Nietzsche, whoever they were. Well, if Jason wanted to feel good about himself, he should have gotten the hell out of Kansas. Wait a second, Charlie thought. Didn't Nietzsche used to play middle linebacker for the Packers?

  Charlie shook the gloom off like it was dandruff and stuffed the letter in his back pocket. He took a leak and went back to the sorting floor.

  Red Stallings, the regional postmaster, was there, his postal blues pressed so sharply that they wore like wood instead of cotton. Red was a Viet Nam vet, and tried to run the office like it was a military unit. Charlie wished Red would choke on his "oh-seven-hundred hours" and his referring to sacks and jeeps as "ordnance." Red glared at Charlie as if expecting a salute, but Charlie just waved and rolled a cart of mail over to the loading bay.

  Charlie killed the rest of the day, dodging Red when he could, then drove his jeep home. He pulled into the drive and looked at his small brown house with its blistered yellow trim and the window screens with fist-sized holes in them. He didn't think of it as his castle so much as a place where his mail got sent. He went inside and changed clothes so he could mow the grass.

  His wife caught him as he was about to go out the door, her face sweaty. "I found this in your work shorts. It about went through the washer," she said, waving the letter in the air as if it were a stick she wanted him to fetch.

  "Oh, I found that in the trash."

  "Since when did you take up stealing people's letters?"

  "When you started sticking your nose in my business, that's when."

  "Why are you getting all mad over somebody you don't even know?" She shaded her eyes with the letter.

  "There's something funny about that letter, and I'm going to try to figure it out," he said.

  "Well, I read it, and it's crazy. Says here 'despair is a prison of my own design and execution.' What's that mean?"

  "Maybe it means sometimes people ask for help and they never get an answer. It's like those letters addressed to Santa Claus. All these kids writing letters telling how good they've been and what the elves can make for them."

  "It makes people feel good. What's wrong with that?"

  "Those letters are nothing but a pain in the rump to the postal service. Because of junk like that, sometimes the real important messages get lost."

  She crossed her arms. "You're getting strange on me, Charlie. That's just one little letter. Just think about the good news you deliver every single day."

  "Yeah, I wonder. Sometimes I wonder if any news is good."

  "Well, don't let that bad stuff rub off on you. Now get the grass mowed, and I'll fix us up some pork chops."

  After dinner, Charlie spent the rest of the evening parked in front of the television set, sipping beer while the Lions ripped the Vikings on Monday Night Football. He forgot all about the letter.

  But in his dreams, he was in a prison camp and words circled overhead like black buzzards and he was digging, digging, digging, trying to escape the oppressive unseen eyes of Jason, who was on guard duty in the barbwire tower above and Charlie was burrowing in the dirt when the searchlights found him and the dirt turned into mounds of rotting mail and a gate lifted and a lion came out to eat him and…he woke up tired and sweaty.

  He made his rounds that day in a haze, as if he were underwater. The letters seemed to burn in his hands. He noticed that it wasn't the electric bills that bothered him, it was the personal letters. He found himself wondering what heartaches he was bringing to people's doors.

  He cursed his imagination and ground the gears of the jeep. He pulled into Poplar Hills and didn't even stop to razz the punters. As he was bringing mail to 106, he almost fell over when a surge of heat flashed through him. He dropped the bundle he was carrying and gripped his knees until the spasm passed. He stooped to collect the mail- a coupon book, a catalog, a telephone bill, and a letter- but he jerked his hand back when he touched the last item.

  Charlie knew what the letter said, as plainly as if he could read it. "I'm coming for the kids," came the words, in an unfamiliar voice. "The courts can't keep me away from my own kids. And in case you're thinking about a restraining order, you go to the cop
s and I'll make you sorry you ever met me. Even sorrier than you already are. Only this time, there won't be any lawyers, just you and me. Just like the good old days."

  Charlie shoved the mail in the slot and backed away. He shook his head and went to 107. He didn't believe in ESP crap. Must be his blood sugar. He'd take off tomorrow and go to the doctor.

  He opened the box at 107 and was about to shovel in the mail when the odd feeling struck him again.

  "Howdy, Hank," came a sultry female voice. "I know you told me not to write you at home, but your wife doesn't open your mail, does she? Anyway, lover, that money you said you'd send hasn't gotten here yet. I like the little games we play, but the rent has to be paid. I'd hate to start sending letters to your wife, with a few photographs dropped in the envelope. What I'm asking for is cheaper than a divorce…"

  Charlie slid the mail in and closed the box. He wiped his hand on his shorts, trying to get rid of the slimy feeling. The letters were talking to him. What was it his wife had said? Something about bad stuff rubbing off?

  He picked up Mauretta Whiting's mail A single letter was among the sweepstakes bundles, and it spoke in a tear-soaked young woman's voice. "Aunt Retta, I'm sorry to hear about your cancer…"

  Charlie jerked his hand back as if he had touched live snakes. If he was going nuts, madness wasn't slowly shadowing him like a moon eclipsing the sun, the way he always figured things like that happened. It was more like flipping off a light switch. Blood sugar, hell. It was the letters.

  He hurried back to the jeep. The out basket sat in the passenger's seat, and voices rose from it, old and thin, raspy and squeaky, bass and tenor, speaking in snatches:

  "…and when Robbie overdosed…"

  "…going to have to apply for food stamps…"

  "…I'm afraid I have some bad news…"